The Dark Flower eBook

Now that she was gone, it was curious how little they
spoke of her, considering how long she had been with
them. And they had from her but one letter written
to Sylvia, very soon after she left, ending:
“Dad sends his best respects, please; and with
my love to you and Mr. Lennan, and all the beasts.—­Nell.

“Oliver is coming here next week. We are
going to some races.”

It was difficult, of course, to speak of her, with
that episode of the flower, too bizarre to be told—­the
sort of thing Sylvia would see out of all proportion—­as,
indeed, any woman might. Yet—­what
had it really been, but the uncontrolled impulse of
an emotional child longing to express feelings kindled
by the excitement of that opera? What but a
child’s feathery warmth, one of those flying
peeps at the mystery of passion that young things take?
He could not give away that pretty foolishness.
And because he would not give it away, he was more
than usually affectionate to Sylvia.

They had made no holiday plans, and he eagerly fell
in with her suggestion that they should go down to
Hayle. There, if anywhere, this curious restlessness
would leave him. They had not been down to the
old place for many years; indeed, since Gordy’s
death it was generally let.

They left London late in August. The day was
closing in when they arrived. Honeysuckle had
long been improved away from that station paling,
against which he had stood twenty-nine years ago, watching
the train carrying Anna Stormer away. In the
hired fly Sylvia pressed close to him, and held his
hand beneath the ancient dust-rug. Both felt
the same excitement at seeing again this old home.
Not a single soul of the past days would be there now—­only
the house and the trees, the owls and the stars; the
river, park, and logan stone! It was dark when
they arrived; just their bedroom and two sitting-rooms
had been made ready, with fires burning, though it
was still high summer. The same old execrable
Heatherleys looked down from the black oak panellings.
The same scent of apples and old mice clung here
and there about the dark corridors with their unexpected
stairways. It was all curiously unchanged, as
old houses are when they are let furnished.

Once in the night he woke. Through the wide-open,
uncurtained windows the night was simply alive with
stars, such swarms of them swinging and trembling
up there; and, far away, rose the melancholy, velvet-soft
hooting of an owl.

Sylvia’s voice, close to him, said:

“Mark, that night when your star caught in my
hair? Do you remember?”

Yes, he remembered. And in his drowsy mind just
roused from dreams, there turned and turned the queer
nonsensical refrain: “I never—­never—­will
desert Mr. Micawber. . . .”

A pleasant month that—­of reading, and walking
with the dogs the country round, of lying out long
hours amongst the boulders or along the river banks,
watching beasts and birds.